The Moment: A Selection

“This is Hunter Thompson. If you can get out here tomorrow, this job is yours. I’ll have my assistant buy you a ticket. You can pick it up at the airport. Tomorrow.”

In 1992, at 3am, Cheryl Della Pietra, now a copyeditor and mother, rolled out of bed in her postage stamp-sized Greenwich Village apartment to answer the ringng phone. Who could it be? In her Moment for SMITH Magazine, she writes:

I’m often up until 2, but almost never 3. And even though at this hour I’ve slept through hotel fire alarms, the phone jars me awake. The voice could be a prank, but it’s too random, and too much as I’ve imagined from what I’ve read. It’s a barky mumble, at once shy and demanding.

“Can you get out here tomorrow?”

“I’m sorry?” I say, sitting up.

“This is Hunter Thompson. If you can get out here tomorrow, this job is yours. I’ll have my assistant buy you a ticket. You can pick it up at the airport. Tomorrow.”

“There lives a voice there now, in the house of my memory, the ghost of the last thing my father said to me. This ghost is a comedian.”

Ask me how my father died and I’ll say, He fell and hit his head. I’ll say, It was a blood vessel that burst. I’ll say, It only took 30 seconds, because that’s what the coroner said. I’ll say, I don’t really know, because no one was there to see what happened, just my father, and he didn’t bother to leave a note, as I’m sure he would have written, Well I’ll be dipped in shit. He was always one to make these kinds of remarks at an inappropriate time—say, when you’re losing a lot of blood, when you’re crawling through broken bottles to find a place to die. (more…)